It’s likely that in the near future, consumers will be able to ask a chatbot to order their dinner for them. AI companies like OpenAI are developing so-called agents that can perform tasks on customers’ behalf, like browsing the web, ordering and paying for things.
These shopping assistants could be potentially disruptive for food delivery companies and the restaurants that increasingly depend on them. Because if consumers can ask a chatbot to order food, why do they need a delivery app?
DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu tackled that question head-on during an earnings call this week. AI agents, he said, may be able to handle the first few steps of the food delivery process, but DoorDash can orchestrate the whole thing. And he believes that will keep customers from leaving.
Delivery apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub not only power restaurant search, ordering and payment via their marketplaces, but also the job of moving food and other products from point A to point B. Their large selection of restaurants, armies of gig workers and sophisticated routing technology make them difficult to compete with.
If and when AI agents get involved, they would likely be handling only the first part: search and discovery, ordering, payment. They would theoretically still rely on existing delivery services to fulfill the orders they process.
Xu believes there's an advantage to owning the entire experience.
“We're actually solving the end-to-end job for a customer, which is to get them some item brought to them in the condition they expect, on time, every time,” he said. “That's actually really hard to do.”
He offered the example of Order with Google, a now-defunct service that allowed customers to order delivery directly through Google and Google Maps, with delivery providers handling fulfillment in the background.
Because Google is often the first place customers go to search for restaurants, this service drove a lot of traffic, he said—“multiple-fold traffic” of what DoorDash was able to bring to those restaurants.
But after customers used Order with Google, they weren’t so likely to use it again, Xu said: DoorDash’s retention and frequency rates dwarfed Google’s.
“Why is that? Well, because after a checkout, things can happen in the physical world,” he said.
For example, a driver might be late, an item might be missing, or a substitution might be needed. DoorDash, not Google or a chatbot, would be the one responsible for sorting out those issues with the customer.
“The end-to-end job at the end of the day I think is how customers will ultimately judge where they do their shopping,” Xu said. “And at the end of the day, wherever the customers keep going back to, that's where the audiences will flow.”
Order with Google was scaled back in 2024 and now acts more like a referral service to other ordering sites, including DoorDash. That is similar to the role Xu sees AI agents playing.
“I view them very much as almost like the new forms of the Googles or other large top-of-funnel channels, if you will,” he said.
DoorDash is certainly interested in using that to its benefit. It’s one of a number of consumer apps, including Uber Eats, that have integrated with ChatGPT. The integration allows users to access and browse the delivery apps via the chatbot, though ordering and checkout still takes place within the delivery apps themselves. About 700 million people use OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot every week, providing a large audience of potential customers.
At the same time, consumers are still flocking directly to DoorDash, the largest of the three U.S. delivery players. In the fourth quarter, total orders increased 32% year over year, to 903 million, while spending on its marketplace rose 39%, to nearly $30 billion. From the third to the fourth quarter alone, sales through its marketplace rose 19%, its biggest quarterly jump since the thick of the pandemic.
DoorDash ended the year with more than 56 million monthly active users. More than 60% of them are members of DashPass, a subscription program that offers free delivery and other perks for a $9.99 monthly fee. These users tend to order more frequently and have been a big part of DoorDash’s momentum. The company reported record DashPass signups in 2025.
Uber Eats also continues to enjoy strong demand: Delivery bookings in the fourth quarter rose 26% year over year and 9% quarter over quarter, to $25.4 billion.
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